From what I hear, it's not a treaty, but an "executive agreement," and being able to skip ratification by the Senate was one reason mentioned when I heard that.
Noone will railroad this, as the true voters in this country vote with their dollar to the representatives' campaign warchests, and those voters want this passed.
I'm pretty sure if this is up for vote, aside from the stray voices on both the right and left, it will get passed (and probably via voice vote or closed chamber).
This is not about getting rid or DRM, this is about the games industry figuring out how they can get more money by double-dipping. We all know that the price of games won't drop even though you now also need to pay residuals to get the full functionality.
As much as I would agree with you here, I think the CEO of Codemasters is saying is that the App and Feature model of gaming is coming and it's going to completely upend the "blockbuster" gaming model. Either the console/PC game manufacturers are going to move pre-emptively, or they're going to get whacked by Apple, Microsoft, Blizzard, and others who are already moving towards both DLC microtransactions as well as subscription-based gaming. Take a look at Steam... which helps developers smooth that transition, and they're not exactly doing poorly.
Finally, there is a social gaming trend afoot that will also (unfortunately, IMHO) upend the whole gaming market, as people play more networked and subscription/micropayment style games (see Zynga's FarmVille or Blizzard's WOW as two viable business models).
The times they are a-changin' and if you don't change with em, you'll get left behind.
... that the number 4 is very unlucky. From a scientific viewpoint, since these things were manufactured in China, perhaps there is some self-fulfilling prophecy going on here.
Overall I'd say that SugarCRM is a useful, but mediocre piece of software. If you can live with its limitations, it is an asset, particularly in a small business
Quite an insightful and valid assessment, as I have worked on it. The major work I ended up doing aside from configuring the basic objects involved lots and LOTS of jQuery to make the UI more responsive and add in non-Sugar JS widgets (which were fed json with a seperate data model layer I wrote myself). Overall, this suite really pales in comparison to Salesforce, but is useful if you need something good OSS wise, I'd go with a smaller lightweight CRM like Fat-Free CRM (RoR), or small/medsize CRM like SalesLogix (Sage).
So, you're saying that the solution to having too much regulation in a market, (telcom) is to install more regulation? How progressive of you.
No, the problem with not enough competition in the market is to create more. Remember: a completely unregulated market will tend to coalesce into a monopoly or cartel fairly shortly. The goal of regulation is to keep the markets competitive. You know, you "free market" zealots should try going to somewhere that has no regulation whatsoever (like say, Sierra Leone) and see how far your ideals take you.
Totally agreed. Any of you foolish libertarians who believe in "free markets" should recognize that Telecom/Cable has basically never been "free". It's been a (somewhat regulated) monopoly at local levels since pretty much day one. Those who would revoke those regulations without forcing open the market (ie, forcing resale of bandwidth/service etc) are basically allowing the telecoms to have their cake and eat it too. Net Neutrality is an attempt at strengthening regulations. In the absence of a free market, I'm all for it.
If you're going to use some visual recognition software to determine location, why not just scan the face and track eyeball or mouth movement or in-air gestures?
No offense, but 10 years ago, everything you wrote was being said about instant messaging, and before that, about email. [Citation needed], but I wouldn't be surprised if the same applied to telephones.
Excuse me, but all of those technologies were open, competitive and/or regulated (even if they were monopolized). Facebook is neither... just like Twitter, I would greatly hesitate to say that Facebook even compares to those. Yes, I have an FB account, but I don't post anything there anymore; Email, RSS feeds and IM keep me connected enough.
Industry: I want regulatory capture, but I'm too cheap to even pay off politicians on a regular basis... I know, how about I tell the politicians and public that we can "police ourselves" and create a (not really) autonomous, "self regulatory" board where only the meaningless crap can be discussed and Industry gets to do what they want on substantive measures.
You were being funny, but I think it's important to point out: we produce about 14 exajoules of energy for electric power a year. We use about 28 exajoules for transportation.
This study seemed to overlook something rather important.
No, I think the study's numbers are on-base. Electric car adoption will not be 100% overnight (or we'd be pretty screwed). They are assuming 500K (out of 300M) cars with current power plant base loads... and that would be 0.0017, about 1/6 of one percent. I think our nighttime base load (which throws away energy right now) can handle it.
And that's assuming you are calculating actual energy converted from gasoline (a horrible conversion loss) and you are not conflating industrial/commercial transport with personal transport.
This is about the unintended consequences outlined here on/. a few days ago.
Think: women who could then be stalked, kids who (with enough research you can find anyones age) could be preyed on by pedos.
When parents ban their kids from using Blizzard products, that *really* hits their bottom line.
The privacy minded gamer was the one they were willing to shaft (along with the discerning LAN-partygoer)
MagSafe is one thing, but their refusal to license their DRM back when they were using it to cement the iPod as the premier MP3 player definitely violated antitrust regulations.
WTF? Are you serious? Apple makes products, and sells music that works on their products (only)... that's not a problem since you can buy a CD or digital music from almost any other source and it works on the player or other music players. You're bonkers if you think that mandated licensing of DRM is a good thing or should be required.
If your time is worth 50 bucks an hour on the market, and your boot time is reduced by 2.5 minutes your ROI is at break even in around 3 work weeks according to my head math.
Boot times? I daily use windows, mac and linux laptops and workstations and I probably only "boot" every month or so.. suspend/restore is completely rock solid on any OS (hibernate for weekends). Resume from standby on a modern machine only takes 3-5 seconds at most (less on a mac). Windows does require a few more average reboots for security updates, but is completely tolerable (just switch to different machine or grab a beverage).
The higher the level the more jargonized and incomprehensible it becomes to everyone else. Worse, it becomes a sign of rite-of-passage, a badge of membership and a competition among its adherents, who constantly push the envelope on this. In doing so they become more and more isolated and insulated, viewing others as outsiders, people to stay away from if not look down on. They become socialized to not speaking outside their box, and pressure is applied from the group ion any member who does try to talk outside.
Even worse than what happens for the insiders is what is left for the outsiders: demagogues, televangelists and industry funded anti-science groups convince those outsiders that the insiders are elitist and despise the outsiders' lack of knowledge... also poisoning the well of understanding while gaining their trust "against the elite science crowd".
Making advanced knowledge as accessible (without reductionism) as possible is the best hope for our continued development as a society and species.
How can a compromised developer account contain iTunes login information?
Are the people who got hacked also developers on the App Store?
How many accounts are known (publicly) to be hacked?
Without more information, it's hard to take any of this as a serious breach... all of these actions could easily have been had by PC malware or Jailbroken phone malware, via the information black market.
[Apple]...seem to have an at times pathological need to be different.
You know, given their current market capitalization as the 2nd most valued company in the US, I think that their striving for competetive differentiation has worked out well for them. Note, their desire isn't pathological, or they'd still be on PowerPC, and using Apple Desktop Bus.
Still think they wouldn't license MagSafe unless they got a significant premium... which might be possible once they finally make an iOS data hub... right now, iOS devices require OSX (or windows) devices to sync.
Um, not in the way that Apple does. If I e-mailed a CEO or support member of just about any other phone manufacturer other than Apple, I wouldn't get a reply like "Stop holding it that way"
< candidate answers, based on practical experience >
Interviewer writes down answer, says "That's very interesting, next candidate please"
You laugh, but this is exactly what happened to a friend of mine interviewing at Cisco. They asked my friend to bring in a 3 month project plan relating to a very specific subject on the phone interview, then, at the in-person, they asked for the documentation, and following the interview,...radio silence....
Which is why you never leave any documents with a potential employer. You want them to hire you first (and even then, you need to keep yourself front-and-center).
So... for $10/month you can get your shows on your iPad and access a few more episodes. But that's about it.
You also get "past seasons"... some of which, based on posts here, were previously available for free, some probably which were not ever available (e.g: X-Files)
I think, despite your dismissal, the added content and access points (not just iPad/iPhone, but also quite a few TV/BR-players/consoles), and 720p content, it makes a whole lot of sense for enough Hulu fans to work.
The further thing to note here is that they may shift even more free items into the paywalled category... from a business point of view, for this to be "successful" they'd have to make more money off the $10/mo than they'd lose by lost advertising revenue from pissing off existing Hulu members that tune out.
I didn't know MS's messenger can communicate with the Wave. And since when it's already in version 4?
Since Microsoft has been trying to copy the Apple Hype Generator (a lower powered Reality Distortion Field)... they figured they couldn't copy Wave, but hell they can just obscure Google's competing tech by crowding the namespace!
Hulu will blink before Apple does. Netflix for instance...
Please don't compare Hulu to Netflix. They have completely different business models, though the offer similar services.
It is completely natural for Netflix to provide a seperate channel for their subscribers (it's like adding a feature service, allowing them to distance themselves from the competition or increase/maintain their service margin).
Hulu, on the other hand, is owned and was created by the big networks as an alternative to bittorrent and iTunes/Amazon for TV shows only, and relies heavily on advertising-based revenue. This ties their hands a lot more than their reliance on Flash (although Flash is more friendly to mandatory advertising now than HTML5). The networks (rightly) fear the net and it's disruptive power to their #1 source of revenue - the advertising based model.
The production values on that game were really great (considering it's 10 years old).
The quotes and tech was very inspiring and the balance and gameplay were really innovative.
My wish: AC2 with hex maps and some of the features of Civ (culture is pretty nice, but it'd be cool to mate it with the "UN" feature in AC)... that or a modern remake of Master of Magic.
Slashdot Mirror
Noone will railroad this, as the true voters in this country vote with their dollar to the representatives' campaign warchests, and those voters want this passed.
I'm pretty sure if this is up for vote, aside from the stray voices on both the right and left, it will get passed (and probably via voice vote or closed chamber).
As much as I would agree with you here, I think the CEO of Codemasters is saying is that the App and Feature model of gaming is coming and it's going to completely upend the "blockbuster" gaming model. Either the console/PC game manufacturers are going to move pre-emptively, or they're going to get whacked by Apple, Microsoft, Blizzard, and others who are already moving towards both DLC microtransactions as well as subscription-based gaming. Take a look at Steam... which helps developers smooth that transition, and they're not exactly doing poorly.
Finally, there is a social gaming trend afoot that will also (unfortunately, IMHO) upend the whole gaming market, as people play more networked and subscription/micropayment style games (see Zynga's FarmVille or Blizzard's WOW as two viable business models).
The times they are a-changin' and if you don't change with em, you'll get left behind.
... that the number 4 is very unlucky. From a scientific viewpoint, since these things were manufactured in China, perhaps there is some self-fulfilling prophecy going on here.
Quite an insightful and valid assessment, as I have worked on it. The major work I ended up doing aside from configuring the basic objects involved lots and LOTS of jQuery to make the UI more responsive and add in non-Sugar JS widgets (which were fed json with a seperate data model layer I wrote myself). Overall, this suite really pales in comparison to Salesforce, but is useful if you need something good OSS wise, I'd go with a smaller lightweight CRM like Fat-Free CRM (RoR), or small/medsize CRM like SalesLogix (Sage).
No, the problem with not enough competition in the market is to create more. Remember: a completely unregulated market will tend to coalesce into a monopoly or cartel fairly shortly. The goal of regulation is to keep the markets competitive. You know, you "free market" zealots should try going to somewhere that has no regulation whatsoever (like say, Sierra Leone) and see how far your ideals take you.
Totally agreed. Any of you foolish libertarians who believe in "free markets" should recognize that Telecom/Cable has basically never been "free". It's been a (somewhat regulated) monopoly at local levels since pretty much day one. Those who would revoke those regulations without forcing open the market (ie, forcing resale of bandwidth/service etc) are basically allowing the telecoms to have their cake and eat it too. Net Neutrality is an attempt at strengthening regulations. In the absence of a free market, I'm all for it.
This just seems a bit legacy.
Excuse me, but all of those technologies were open, competitive and/or regulated (even if they were monopolized). Facebook is neither... just like Twitter, I would greatly hesitate to say that Facebook even compares to those. Yes, I have an FB account, but I don't post anything there anymore; Email, RSS feeds and IM keep me connected enough.
Industry: I want regulatory capture, but I'm too cheap to even pay off politicians on a regular basis... I know, how about I tell the politicians and public that we can "police ourselves" and create a (not really) autonomous, "self regulatory" board where only the meaningless crap can be discussed and Industry gets to do what they want on substantive measures.
No, I think the study's numbers are on-base. Electric car adoption will not be 100% overnight (or we'd be pretty screwed). They are assuming 500K (out of 300M) cars with current power plant base loads... and that would be 0.0017, about 1/6 of one percent. I think our nighttime base load (which throws away energy right now) can handle it.
And that's assuming you are calculating actual energy converted from gasoline (a horrible conversion loss) and you are not conflating industrial/commercial transport with personal transport.
This is about the unintended consequences outlined here on /. a few days ago.
Think: women who could then be stalked, kids who (with enough research you can find anyones age) could be preyed on by pedos.
When parents ban their kids from using Blizzard products, that *really* hits their bottom line.
The privacy minded gamer was the one they were willing to shaft (along with the discerning LAN-partygoer)
WTF? Are you serious? Apple makes products, and sells music that works on their products (only)... that's not a problem since you can buy a CD or digital music from almost any other source and it works on the player or other music players. You're bonkers if you think that mandated licensing of DRM is a good thing or should be required.
Boot times? I daily use windows, mac and linux laptops and workstations and I probably only "boot" every month or so.. suspend/restore is completely rock solid on any OS (hibernate for weekends). Resume from standby on a modern machine only takes 3-5 seconds at most (less on a mac). Windows does require a few more average reboots for security updates, but is completely tolerable (just switch to different machine or grab a beverage).
Even worse than what happens for the insiders is what is left for the outsiders: demagogues, televangelists and industry funded anti-science groups convince those outsiders that the insiders are elitist and despise the outsiders' lack of knowledge... also poisoning the well of understanding while gaining their trust "against the elite science crowd".
Making advanced knowledge as accessible (without reductionism) as possible is the best hope for our continued development as a society and species.
Are the people who got hacked also developers on the App Store?
How many accounts are known (publicly) to be hacked?
Without more information, it's hard to take any of this as a serious breach... all of these actions could easily have been had by PC malware or Jailbroken phone malware, via the information black market.
You know, given their current market capitalization as the 2nd most valued company in the US, I think that their striving for competetive differentiation has worked out well for them. Note, their desire isn't pathological, or they'd still be on PowerPC, and using Apple Desktop Bus.
Still think they wouldn't license MagSafe unless they got a significant premium... which might be possible once they finally make an iOS data hub... right now, iOS devices require OSX (or windows) devices to sync.
Yeah, if you email AT&T's CEO you'll get a nice friendly cease and desist warning.
I am completely sick of being screwed over by the corporatist plutocrats.
I put on my robe and wizard hat...
You laugh, but this is exactly what happened to a friend of mine interviewing at Cisco. They asked my friend to bring in a 3 month project plan relating to a very specific subject on the phone interview, then, at the in-person, they asked for the documentation, and following the interview, ...radio silence....
Which is why you never leave any documents with a potential employer. You want them to hire you first (and even then, you need to keep yourself front-and-center).
You also get "past seasons"... some of which, based on posts here, were previously available for free, some probably which were not ever available (e.g: X-Files)
I think, despite your dismissal, the added content and access points (not just iPad/iPhone, but also quite a few TV/BR-players/consoles), and 720p content, it makes a whole lot of sense for enough Hulu fans to work.
The further thing to note here is that they may shift even more free items into the paywalled category... from a business point of view, for this to be "successful" they'd have to make more money off the $10/mo than they'd lose by lost advertising revenue from pissing off existing Hulu members that tune out.
Since Microsoft has been trying to copy the Apple Hype Generator (a lower powered Reality Distortion Field)... they figured they couldn't copy Wave, but hell they can just obscure Google's competing tech by crowding the namespace!
Please don't compare Hulu to Netflix. They have completely different business models, though the offer similar services.
It is completely natural for Netflix to provide a seperate channel for their subscribers (it's like adding a feature service, allowing them to distance themselves from the competition or increase/maintain their service margin).
Hulu, on the other hand, is owned and was created by the big networks as an alternative to bittorrent and iTunes/Amazon for TV shows only, and relies heavily on advertising-based revenue. This ties their hands a lot more than their reliance on Flash (although Flash is more friendly to mandatory advertising now than HTML5). The networks (rightly) fear the net and it's disruptive power to their #1 source of revenue - the advertising based model.
My wish: AC2 with hex maps and some of the features of Civ (culture is pretty nice, but it'd be cool to mate it with the "UN" feature in AC)... that or a modern remake of Master of Magic.
It would kill not only HFT, but also make front-running less profitable.
I know "tax" is a verboten word in this land of corporate-libertarianism, but doesn't this kind of market restraint simply make sense?